A prolific political fundraiser and grass-roots organizer, President Barack Obama is quickly putting his stamp on the Democratic Party as he seeks to build on his groundbreaking campaign and the party's sweeping victories in back-to-back elections.

One day after Obama was sworn into office and a few after he announced that his massive campaign organization would become a special project of the party, the Democratic National Committee formally elected the president's choice for chairman – Tim Kaine – and several vice chairmen who are presidential allies.

The team's task: taking a Democratic Party that's extraordinarily empowered to the next level by supporting Obama's governing agenda while preparing for the midterm elections in 2010 and, ultimately, Obama's anticipated re-election campaign two years later.

In his first speech as chairman, Kaine channeled Obama when he added another objective: Defining the Democratic Party as a problem-solving, positive, unifying body that embraces the values of hard work and equality, while rejecting ideological fights, partisan gridlock and hard-core negative rhetoric.

"President Obama promised to usher in a new kind of American politics – and I'm eager to help him make good on that promise," the Virginia governor said. "The challenges facing our citizens and our nation are too great to tolerate the division and bickering that so often characterize our politics. We can get our country moving forward again, but only if we will enlist the help of all Americans, from all perspectives and all walks of life."

That vision of the party amounts to a repudiation of the approach of former President George W. Bush and his political guru, Karl Rove, who focused on the GOP base and energizing core supporters.

Obama's election and Kaine's ascension mark a new era for a Democratic Party that has grown stronger over the past four years under Howard Dean after struggling to keep pace with its GOP counterpart at the outset of Bush's presidency.

Operationally, the party aims to build on Dean's 50-state strategy of strengthening state and local organizations across the country – instead of ignoring Republican bastions – and harness Obama's ability to raise record-shattering sums of money.

And, even though national political parties by definition are partisan, both Obama and Kaine have signaled that they want the party – which is filled with fierce loyalists gunning hard to win elections – to reflect the president's inclusive tone and new-style politics that puts pragmatism over partisanship.

Adhering to tradition, Obama assumed control of the party when he locked up the Democratic presidential nomination last summer. But the bulk of his attention was centered then on his own campaign, hailed by Democrats and Republicans alike as among the most powerful political organization in recent history.

Last weekend, Obama announced that his campaign – including its 13 million e-mail addresses that cut across the political spectrum – would be turned into an entity called Organizing for America and housed at the DNC. Its goals: supporting local candidates, lobbying for the president's agenda and remaining connected with Obama's grass-roots backers.

The move is drawing praise from many Democratic state leaders.

They include several who praise Obama's campaign organizers as the best grass-roots operatives the party has had in years and say that their involvement at the DNC will ensure state and local parties will continue to be strengthened by the national committee.

Others point to the obvious – Obama's expected re-election race.

"It's important that the structure is staying in place because 2012 will be here before we know it," said Daniel Parker, Indiana's party chairman.

For his part, Dean relinquished the party reins he held for four years with a few cautionary words to the several hundred Democrats attending the party's winter meeting.

"We have together built our party into a national powerhouse but we have a lot of work to do because we have to keep it going," Dean said. "We can't appear complacent."

Indeed, complacency is an inherent risk for any party that has such a depth of power. Democrats now have control of the White House, expanded majorities in Congress and advantages in governor's mansions and state legislatures across the country.

But several Democrats generally expressed optimism Wednesday that Obama and the new DNC leadership will ensure activists remain engaged.

Said Andrew O'Leary, executive director of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party: "We need to keep focused and not get fat, dumb, happy or arrogant the way the Republicans did."